Trading pits are the lifeblood of a market economy. Quantities of goods and shares in companies are bought and sold by millions of investors through trading pits on exchanges everyday. When a particular trading product or item is more valued, the value of the item is driven up as a result of more aggressive bidding by the buyers. When an item is less valued, the value of the item is driven down as a result of more aggressive offers to sell the item. The successful trader anticipates the rise or fall of the value of an item and performs his or her own transaction before-the rest of the market is aware of the item's potential gain or loss in value. Thus, anticipation of the market and specifically of the future demand for an item of interest is critical to the success of a trader.
The transactions for each item occur in a trading pit for that item. The trading pit is a designated area in an exchange in which the customers submit their orders, either bids or offers, for the item to a broker in the pit. The exchange records all transactions and relays or posts to the individual traders the outstanding bid having the highest value and the outstanding offer having the lowest value for the item, along with the quantity specified in the order. The exchange does not release information on all outstanding offers and bids to the traders because, in part, this information is what gives the market makers an advantage over the traders and enables the market makers to change their own trading directions quickly, step in front of customer orders, and use customer limit orders to protect the market makers from losses. However, for an individual trader, having only the latest order information for an item complicates the trader's task of ascertaining trends in the orders for an item because the trader has very little information about the volume of offers and bids or the rate at which these volumes are changing.
Other information is also used by the trader to anticipate the market, including current exchange performances, historical transaction data for the item, the number of traders at the pit, and the trader's sense of the activity of the pit. However, it is often difficult for a trader to quickly assemble this information from diverse and often unrelated sources or even effectively process all of this information in order to make an informed transaction decision. From this information, and other external information, the trader must attempt to determine trends in the buying or selling for the item in order to anticipate the market and the demand for a particular item.
Thus, a system is needed in which trend information of market demand for an individual item is provided to traders in an intuitive format which allows traders to quickly interpret how market demand is changing to an item. A system is also needed which provides contextual information about the item or the market to the trader while the trader is trading on a specific item in a manner which allows the trader to quickly interpret the information and then act accordingly.